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How Google Cost Me $4 Million
- mustpax 16y agoYou had me until "I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking." Google did not cost you $4 million, the fact that you were spamming Google did. As it very well should.
- dabent 16y agoApparently the editors at Inc. came up with that headline, not the author: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646234
- gojomo 16y agoThat's traditional for print publications. A reporter or essayist may get to suggest a title... but editors usually compose the headlines.
- rit 16y agoI was looking for that one. In one paragraph he says they didn't do anything and the algorithms must have changed. And then he called his SEOs.
- Semiapies 16y agoThis whole post boils down to, *After being dope-slapped for SEO hijinks, we leaned how to properly make people aware of us. Aren't we cool?"
- alex_c 16y agoI think that's a very valuable point to make, though. None of this stuff is obvious to someone who doesn't live and breathe technology and who wants to use the web to grow a bricks-and-mortar business.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoDo you not mean after being penalised for spaming google we learned to spam everyone else but google?
- luigi 16y agoDevelopers can and should take care of SEO themselves. No so-called experts needed. I did a talk about it this weekend at Lone Star Ruby Conf: http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-development-lone-star-ruby-conference-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...
- sosuke 16y agoSEO is great for developers but he was paying for SEM, those folks cold contacted sites to link back to him, that takes a lot of time to do and SEO alone won't get you to the top of the SERPs for common keywords.
- luigi 16y agoCold contacting sites to ask for linkbacks is not marketing, it's a lame and rarely successful attempt to game PageRank.
- sosuke 16y agoI haven't done it myself because my wallet isn't deep enough but I've seen it be very successful for my competitors who's emails make it into my inbox and I then check their Google link: list that shows it does actually work. Lame or not the proof is in the search engine result position.
- byrneseyeview 16y ago1. It's PR. PR via email, but still PR. 2. Maybe it's lame. 3. Rarely successful? Any data there? It has certainly worked for the people I've done it for. 4. PageRank is not the goal. Qualified, revenue-producing traffic is the goal.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoOf course PageRank increases qualified, revenue-producing traffic.
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- byrneseyeview 16y agoHiring two SEO companies is a terrible idea. You know they'll compete, and the one that uses the most aggressive (i.e. black-hat) techniques will probably win. I generally turn down SEO projects when there's another firm involved.
- lzw 16y agoSince you do SEO, HN might benefit from a blog post about how to do legitimate SEO, or why to hire SEO people. I consider SEO as part of the design of projects I consider, I don't consider it a service or something I might hire someone to do, but then my perception is that outsourced SEO means spamming links around. I admit I may be ignorant and maybe you can enlighten us.
- byrneseyeview 16y agoI highly recommend Patio11's writing on the subject, especially: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ Patrick is a member of the excellent seobook.com community, which is also a great source.
- sireat 16y agoI used to love reading Aarons seobook.com blog, back when it was just selling an e-book, but I am curious these days about worth of the $300 a month tag for "joining" a community. I would have thought one would need to do well over low 6 figures to justify such an expense. Edit: I see Patrick is a moderator, so I assume it is a "barter" deal.
- patio11 16y agoI used to pay a hundred a month for it, though I get it free now because text boxes activate my write advice instinct, and some advice helped people out. BCC does substantially in excess of $3.6k a year due to advice I got from Aaron. YMMV.
- kgo 16y agoIn the guys defense, he's not exactly Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He runs a freaking flower shop. SEO isn't exactly a 'core-copentency'. I don't think it was unreasonable for him to assume that the business' he hired to do SEO were operating in a legal and ethical manner.
- petercooper 16y agoStanding separate from the article's revelations, hiring companies to "improve your ranking" is not on its own the same as "spamming Google." This isn't an attack on your statement, but an attempt at clarifying something that could be misunderstood by readers. There are plenty of ethical, reputable freelancers and companies who advice businesses on SEO related issues like getting title tags right, producing compelling content, good file name structure, and beneficial white-hat stuff like that.
- baby 16y agoI have 60000 fans on my facebook page and it doesn't really help me. So when I hear about ~3000 fans, I don't see how you can do something of it. Same remark for tweeter
- Murkin 16y agoWhy is this down-voted ? One of his big "lessons" is doing social-media. Can't imagine how much money he spends on FanPage and Twitter. Only can wonder if that expense pulls him any clients (especially compared to Google's search).
- sosuke 16y agoWhat were the two SEO companies he hired? Even though they cost him $4 million in sales he wasn't making that $8.9 million a year without their help.
- ck2 16y agoTitle correction for the original article: How we admitted to violating Google's trust and threw away $4 million in business.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoor How we gamed Google to lay the foundation for our success Would they have had the opportunity to lose $4M if they hadn't gamed Google?
- ck2 16y agoI wonder if they could have had $1M in business without getting greedy (or any SEO whatsoever).
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoI'm pretty sure I know the specific SEO that broke Google's guidelines and paid for links that pass PageRank, which led to this site not ranking as highly. But I'll leave it to the gift basket company to see if they want to call out which SEO it was that got them into trouble.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoHi. Very nice to see you here Matt. Logically, what is the difference between paying for links and spamming sites, or, spamming webmasters, or other active link building practices? Also, I wanted to ask, what is the difference between advertising on a website by the way of them putting my link on their site, somewhat like the google link ads I suppose, but on a more permanent basis, that is, at what point does direct link advertising for exposure to the traffic of that certain website become link buying? Should google not try and rely on other variables which are more reliable determinants of quality than links?
- pier0 16y agoOr what is difference between paying for spamming ads and paying for google ads? Oh wait, I know this one: with the second one Google makes billions.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoAndrew, the difference with buying normal ads (as opposed to links) is that ads don't affect search engines, while buying links that pass PageRank does affect search engines--and all search engines, for that matter. Imagine if you bought an ad in a magazine and you started to get better "rankings" from the magazine in terms of more positive coverage. Most people wouldn't want that. To your last question, Google absolutely does have hundreds of signals that we use in our ranking; we don't rely only on links. It's a hard problem to assess quality accurately, but we try to find different ways to do it.
- johnandrews 16y agoI love this! Company gets nailed for going "too far" in an industry that clearly stretches the limits, and then begs for reinclusion. It strikes a deal and gets back in (worth millions). They then publish an article praising Google and denouncing SEO... clearly part of the bargain? And now Matt Cutts suggests they might even name the particular SEO firm.. "if they want to"? Classic SEO world.Google rocks... you all know it.
- dantheman 16y agoDoes a flower or giftbasket shop really need to tweetspam everday?
- jonknee 16y agoHis site still looks like SEO spam so I'm not sure he learned his lesson. There are tons of content-less pages to keyword stuff like this: http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh.asp http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh.... I also find it odd that every page features 20 logos from media outlets. That doesn't get them anything and I seriously doubt mentioning the Colbert Report helps sell gift baskets. Link trading is still advertised, which seems risky considering that's very close to what got them in trouble in the first place. http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/partners.htm
- hellweaver666 16y agoI'm not defending the dodgy SEO company but I think a lot of people forget that for a long time buying links was a perfectly "normal" practice and was not penalised by Google (it was a grey area, but at the time - everyone was doing it). Then Google ran an update and lots of sites got penalised for doing it. In this guys case, it may not even have been an update that did it, but the results of their competition sending a report to Google's web spam team - I've seen this happen to people I've built sites for in the past. It's a morally questionable tactic, but I've seen sites benefit by focusing on bringing their opponents down rather than boosting their own ranking.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoMorally questionable? I suppose it is the old dilemma of whether you should tell the teacher that someone is cheating in their exam. I never did, but you certainly should and have the moral high ground because they are not playing fair.
- ddemchuk 16y agoI have to admit, I hate seeing SEO posts submitted here. Not because I don't like them, but because of the ignorance so many of you show towards any use or mention of SEO. SEO isn't bad, Google themself has an SEO guide they released for webmasters. Building links is not a bad thing, Google created the entire link building game by relying on them for determining ranking. Some of you need to step down from your damn pedestal and realize that marketing makes money. No one is going to link to your site if they don't know it exists. Link building and SEO is not illegal, and is a very valid way to make money. I would imagine the vast majority of you have nowhere near enough experience to even comment on the use of SEO as opposed to when it comes to something like another Haskell VS. OCaml post. EDIT: for misuse of a word
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoBe civil. No need to tell us what we know or do not know, we know that much better than you. Rather tell us what you know which is of relevance to the topic in discussion.
- ddemchuk 16y agoQuite frankly, a group of people whining about someone gaming the system of a massive highly profitable company and not really understanding the underlying dynamics of said practices is something I feel needs to called out and denounced. I don't criticize the australian government because I'm ignorant of their setup. The majority of people here think the only morally acceptable form of seo is using h1 tags and making sure to have alt tags on their images. There's a whole different side of seo that must be used in order to even tread water in most markets.
- ShabbyDoo 16y agoI bet this guy now would be willing to pay Google $100K+/year for personalized escalation services should such an issue arise again. What if Google had one set of rules for every site it crawled, but offered a personalized appeals process for those who paid up? I'm not sure if I like the idea or not. Let's presume that any "penalty box" algorithms end up (A) wrongly punishing some and (B) incorrectly ignoring others. What if Google's search results changed as a result of this "court only for those who pay" policy such that only those in Category A who didn't pay up were excluded? Would Google's evilness be reduced compared to the current state of affairs? Of course, Google would be less evil if it offered everyone their day in court for free.